Forgive me, dear friends, if I seem an emotional fool. But when I recovered from the swoon which blotted out that unnatural spectacle, the wizard--for now I knew him for nothing less--had dug a deep trench--and had left me, alone. Not a jackal was in sight; the sun blazed cruelly upon the desert. With my own hands I laid my love to rest in the sands. No cross, no crescent marks her resting-place; but I left my youth upon her grave, as a last offering. You may say that, since I had sinned so grievously, since I had betrayed the noble confidence of Saïd Mohammed, my host, I escaped lightly. Ah! you do not know! And what of the strange being whose gratitude I had done so little to merit but yet which knew no bounds? It is of him that I will tell you. Years later--how many it does not matter, but I was a man with no illusions--my restless wanderings (I being still a desert bird-of-passage) brought me one night to a certain well but rarely visited. It lay in a depression, like another well that I am fated often to see in my dreams, and, as one approached, the crowns of the palm trees which grew there appeared above the mounds of sand. I was alone and tired out; the next possible camping-place--for I had no water--was many miles away. Yet it was written that I should press on to that other distant well, weary though I was. First, then, as I came up, I perceived numbers of vultures in the air; and I began to fear that someone near to his end lay at the well. But when, from the top of a mound, I obtained a closer view, I saw a sight that, after one quick glance, caused me to spur up my tired horse and to fly--fly, with panic in my heart. The brilliant moon bathed the hollow in light and cast dense shadows of the palm stems upon the slope beyond. By the spring, his fallen face ghastly in the moonlight, in a clear space twenty feet across, lay a dead man. Even from where I sat I knew him; but, had I doubted, other evidence was there of his identity. As I mounted the slope, thousands of fiery eyes were turned upon me. God! that arena all about was alive with jackals--jackals, my friends, eaters of carrion--which, silent, watchful, guarded the wizard dead, who, living, had been their lord! II LURE OF SOULS I This is the story which Bernard Fane told me one afternoon as we sat sipping China tea in the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, following a round upon the neighboring links. The life of a master at the training college (said Fane) is beastly uneventful, taken all around; not even _your_ keen sense of the romantic could long survive it. The duties are not very exacting, certainly, and in our own way I suppose we are Empire builders of a sort; but when you ask me for a true story of Egyptian life, I find myself floored at once.